Electronic Book Review - dreamhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/dream
en"With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be": An Interview with Zoe Beloffhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/numerous
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jussi Parikka</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-10-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Scottish born and New York placed artist Zoe Beloff is one of the leading names in “media archaeological art” that reimagines and creatively remixes narrative and technological elements and themes from new and old media into fresh assemblages. Beloff is internationally recognized for a range of her works, which have been exhibited at venues that include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the 2009 Athens Biennale. Her work has also been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beloff’s projects have been supported by several grants and fellowships, including, in 2003, the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her projects that work through cinematic and media-cultural ideas question the novelty of digital technologies and rethink histories of visual culture in non-linear ways.</p>
<p>This conversation between Zoe Beloff and media theorist Jussi Parikka took place in March 2011 and was planned to elaborate Beloff’s artistic methods, especially in relation to the theoretical discussions in media archaeology. Media archaeology is an emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that address media history in new, often unconventional ways - both looking for elements of repetition as well as variation in the past. Media archaeology wants to understand new and emerging media cultures through the past. As such, media archaeology has been elaborated by scholars such as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and Wolfgang Ernst, but likewise the work of visual culture and media writers such as Tom Gunning, Anne Friedberg, Lev Manovich, William Uricchio, Friedrich Kittler and for instance Jonathan Crary has been essential to the birth of this disciplinary – and artistic – field. In addition to theories, media archaeology is executed through concrete art works – such as Beloff’s.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Jussi Parikka:</span> Your work has extensively dealt with 19th century pre-cinematic media cultures, but in a manner that does not deal with such technologies only as past, forgotten inventions, but as something resurrected. One could characterize your work through hybridity of old and new media. Would you consider yourself as a media archaeological artist, and could you tell us a bit more about your artistic approach to old media?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Zoe Beloff:</span> Yes, I do consider myself a media archaeological artist, but I might put the word “artist” first; though, when I began my investigations in the mid-1990s, I had not heard the term media archaeology. From a theoretical perspective, I was most inspired by two books, Jonathan Crary’s <span class="booktitle">Techniques of the Observer</span> and <span class="booktitle">the Wireless Imagination</span> edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. These books, along with my interest in the birth of cinema and nineteenth century stereo photography, really inspired me to think about our relationship with media technology. It is this complex relationship between perception, mental imagery, and the apparatus that is the focus of my work.</p>
<p>Another key event for me in terms of my “media archaeological” interests was attending an evening at the American Museum of the Moving Image where collectors were demonstrating their primitive hand cranked projectors. These apparatuses are very different from modern projectors. Light spills out everywhere. They are jerky. The earliest ones don’t even have a mechanism for a take-up reel. I started to think about how an audience a hundred years ago experienced movies very differently than we do today. Even when we watch an early film, it is a very different experience to that of an audience member who experienced them first hand. For example projectionists in the early 1900s really performed the movies. They would vary speed of the films according to what they saw on the screen or they might project the same short film over and over as a loop till people got bored and they moved on to another one.</p>
<p>Through such examples and events, I began to realize that the apparatus is always a part of the storytelling process - part of the experience of understanding media - whether people are aware of it or not. I had the idea that, to conjure up the past, it was not enough just to work with historical imagery or archival footage; one must think also about projection apparatuses of an earlier era. Soon afterwards I created a short projection performance called <span class="filmtitle">Lost</span> (1995). I worked with a stereoscopic slide projector, a toy hand cranked 16mm projector, and a hand cranked phonograph. I took 3D slides of very old and dusty stores in my neighborhood (since then they have all gone out of business) and projected fragments of 16mm film into them in such a way that ghostly figures from the past seemed to inhabit the shop windows. The film fragments came from Edison films, an Émile Cohl animation, and a primitive stag film. The whole performance with the 78rpm records skipping and the film moving forward and back, jumping in the gate was incredibly precarious. I imagined that somehow these dusty old shop windows might contain or reflect back the memories of those who had passed by over many decades. I thought that, by using this junk shop assortment of old apparatuses, I could suggest this fragile and virtual space of memory. I wanted to foreground the nineteenth century idea that machines of mechanical reproduction are really “time machines”: cinema - a time machine of movement - frame by frame awakening forgotten fantasies, stereo photography bringing about the artificial reconstruction of space, and the phonograph resurrecting the voices of the dead.</p>
<p>I was using a variety of media technologies from different eras, 1920s through the 1950s, that people had in their homes. In a way one could think of these apparatuses from different time periods as analogous to the imagery I was conjuring up - contained layers of time superimposed over each, memories from different eras.</p>
<p>But despite my interest in the apparatus and the technological as a component of media culture, it’s important to note that I’m - as I said - I’m an artist first and not a historian. So when thinking about what technology I want to use, I always start with the story and think about what might be the most expressive way to convey my ideas rather than trying to be literally accurate in a strictly historical sense. With each project, I find myself reimagining what cinema might be. For example, I discovered the book <span class="booktitle">Shadow Land: or, Light from the Other Side</span> - the autobiography of English spiritualist medium Elizabeth d’Esperance - at the same time I stumbled upon a 16mm 3D Bolex motion picture camera on Ebay. Even though the 3D Bolex was invented in the early 1950s, it seemed to me to be the perfect apparatus to make a film of her autobiography. I was particularly struck by the fact that she wrote the book in 1897 at the moment cinema was born. I started to think of the full body apparitions that she apparently conjured up during her séances as proto-cinematic figures. But there was one key difference: these phantom figures appeared to cross over into the space of the sitters and move among them. I wanted to find a visual equivalent to this breaking of the boundary between spectator and image. By projecting black and white 3D film I was able to give the impression of phantom figures crossing over into the space of the audience. Of course the nineteenth century was a very stereoscopic century; photographs were most commonly viewed in stereoscopic viewers, so a 3D camera seemed appropriate - even this camera, which was invented almost sixty years later.</p>
<p>When I made <span class="filmtitle">Shadow Land</span> (2000) and <span class="filmtitle">Charming Augustine</span> (2005), I wanted to find a way to de-familiarize cinema, to make the present day audience feel like they were seeing film for the first time. Because of the technology of the stereo Bolex projection lens, I have to use a silver screen, and the projector has to be in the space of the audience rather than in the projection booth. The image itself has a vertical aspect ratio, so viewers see a spectral black and white 3D image that is very different from the moving images we are used to. In a sense they do become like the scientists of the nineteenth century crowded around their experimental projection apparatus. Like the participants of a séance they know what they are seeing is an illusion, yet they perceive three-dimensional phantom figures anyway, such is the suspension of disbelief.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/charming_augustine_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="498" /></p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In a way, you are then tactically short-circuiting components across different media-cultural epochs. In addition, your method has extended towards digital technologies and combined them with themes that address the 19th century. Does that work - routing of media cultural topics through the old - also work as a critique of the new, such as the digital?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span>Indeed, I have also worked with digital technology to conjure up the 19th century, which is, of course, absurdly anachronistic. <span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span> began as a web serial in 1995. I used a webcam to create short movies in which I travelled into the past and explored the relationships between technology and the unconscious from the 1850s to the beginning of World War II. Here I very consciously wanted to use an early technology of our era, that is the tiny black and white webcam, to make connections between our entry into the realm of the digital and the birth of mechanical media in 19th century. I felt we could learn from the incredibly imaginative outpouring of ideas, ranging from the philosophical to the crazy and poetic, that came hand in hand with these inventions. At the same time, I wanted to show that, in many ways, what was being hyped by corporations as the latest thing in the digital domain was no more than a reworking of 19th century technologies, like the panorama or the zoetrope. So I also think of it as very much a critique of progress in the way that Walter Benjamin discussed.</p>
<p>Just because a technology is new I don’t think it is better; digital cameras aren’t, per se, better than glass plate photography. It is just a different kind of apparatus that does different things. At the same time, I don’t fetishize the past or historical objects. I am interested in creating some kind of dialog with the past to help us think through our relationship with media today.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In various art projects, you have consistently engaged not only with resurrecting past media but also been aware of the problematic gender contexts of early media cultures. The female body itself has functioned as a “medium” in various meanings of the term: mediating between the immaterial and material regimes, as an index of the new mediatic worlds, as well as media in the sense of the excluded middle - the media that is not paid attention to despite its crucial role as the material basis for communication. Would you say that you are interested in such expansions of the notion of the medium, or what function does this idea of addressing human, female bodies as media serve?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> In his novel <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>, Thomas Pynchon described a character as a “medium, an interface between worlds.” He meant the word as designating a spirit medium but also, in my opinion, in relationship to new technologies that were changing the nature of the world during the Second World War. I quoted this line in <span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span>. I thought of myself as a medium between the world of illusion that the viewer experienced and the underworld of the computer that was in process of learning how to program.</p>
<p>My father was a parapsychologist, and so I was pretty familiar with the paranormal; although, much to his disappointment, I personally had no extrasensory talents. I wish I could take “thought photographs” but I can’t. At the same time, I do think of myself as an interface, in a sense, between past and present - real and imaginary.</p>
<p><span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span> included a number of episodes of séances in which apparitions appeared. Today there are a lot of media theorists who have been doing research in this area, but, at the time, I think Tom Gunning was the only person I could find who was writing about the relationship between early media and mediumship; the medium as a kind of camera or projector dispensing “images from her orifices.” As I have said, I am interested in exploring the relationship between desire, the unconscious, and the moving image. I was interested in spirit mediums as “thought projectors,” who created an environment where people believed they saw moving images around them. Such was the power of suggestion or the suspension of disbelief, which still holds us in its sway every time we see a movie. To me, this is just as valid a form of image making as a machine that literally projects an image.</p>
<p>I think that the history of technology often only considers the physical apparatus not the desires, or the social world, that lead to its creation. <span class="filmtitle">Charming Augustine</span> addressed that very question. It is about a young woman whose performance of hysterical symptoms fascinated the medical profession of Paris in the 1870s. The doctors and the technical staff of the Salpêtrière worked very hard to document these performances through transcripts of what she said in states of delirium and through photographs of her hysterical attacks. I think that this desire to capture both image and sound led to the development not just of film, but of narrative cinema: melodrama. In this way I think of the technical development of sound cinema and the production of melodrama and as growing out of a collaboration between the women patients, the doctors, and the technologists like the photographers Paul Régnard and Albert Londe. Too often it is simply the technologists who go down in the history books not those who created the desire for the apparatus, the reason for its existence. In this sense Elizabeth d’Esperance and Augustine were also important to the invention of the moving image. It was women like them who opened up a space of desire, of possibility that the moving image apparatus could come into existence.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> What strikes me as interesting about your work (from <span class="filmtitle">The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A</span> to <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span> and too, of course, your recent interest in the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society) is the entwining of psychoanalytic themes with media/cinema.</p>
<p>Your way of addressing mediatic dream worlds seems to take place in this dual articulation between sciences of the mind and the popular media culture. Can we think of media, or even more specifically the cinematic, as one analytical, even archaeological, tool to investigate the mind and its aberrations?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> I think you are asking if we can think of cinema as a psychoanalytic tool to investigate the unconscious, an interesting question.</p>
<p>Of course Freud himself had no interest in film. He turned away from the visual, and the image as a tool, to investigate the mind that had been used extensively in clinics such as the Salpêtrière, which he visited in the 1890s. Instead, he started to listen. The word and the narrative were important to Freud.(As an aside I’ve always liked the story that Charcot refused to give credence to the unconscious because it was invisible, and he couldn’t bear that there was something about a patient that you couldn’t see.) However, Freud’s fascination with narrative brings him back into the world of cinema from another perspective. And psychoanalysis has been a tool to analyze narrative cinema for quite a long time now, with Slavoj Žižek being perhaps its most visible proponent today.</p>
<p>From the early 1920s, at least, artists and theorists have been interested in the connection between cinema and the dream state, with both in reference to the viewing situation of the darkened theatre and to films themselves. Surrealist cinema and avant-garde filmmakers were interested in making films that were in some sense analogous to the dream. And after all Hollywood used to be known as the “Dream Factory.”</p>
<p>I too, think of moving images as a way to conjure up hallucinatory states. In <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span> (2008), I was interested less in referencing cinema than creating a virtual theatre to convey the idea of a “theatre of the mind.” I created an installation with small virtual 3D figures moving around inside an actual miniature theatre made of wood. The psychologist Pierre Janet (on whose case histories the project is based) wrote about how his hysterical patients would go into a state of delirium where they would talk to people only they could see. They saw, before them, fantastic figures right there in the room. So virtual theatre seemed like an interesting way to embody their visions. Indeed, popular theatre with its stock of characters seemed to be the something that they unconsciously drew to embody their fears.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/somnambulists_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="371" /></p>
<p>In my exhibition <span class="filmtitle">Dreamland: the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926-1972</span> I do explore the idea of cinema as a psychoanalytical tool in a most literal fashion. Viewers are informed that the Society held an annual competition in which members were invited to re-enact their dreams on film and analyze them. I presented ten of these dream films, which illuminate the hopes, fears and fantasies of working people from the neighborhood ranging from immigrant Jews and Italians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960s. I imagined that they might have been inspired to make these films not only by the excitement around amateur movie making that began in the 1920s with the introduction of 16mm film but also by the Society’s very literal reading of passages from Freud’s <span class="booktitle">The Interpretation of Dreams</span> - specifically, where Freud discusses the idea that in dreams, wish fulfillment is often hard to discern because it is disguised by various procedures including the condensation and displacement of ideas and the dramatization of thoughts and desires in the form of “mental pictures.” Thus, when we dream we do not experience a wish as an abstract, intangible concept; instead, we find ourselves protagonists in a fully formed virtual world complete with characters we may or may not recognize from our waking life, caught up in strange and often suspenseful situations.</p>
<p>However, what I was really interested was not this very literal idea of creating re-enactments of one’s dreams on film; rather, it was the idea of actual home movies as psychoanalytic objects, very much the way Freud thought of jokes or slips of the tongue - as objects that reveal much more than their makers were consciously aware of. I created <span class="filmtitle">The Dream Films</span> (2009) with home movies that I collected over many years; I just edited them and added the titles. I simply wanted to suggest that all home movies, in their immediacy and spontaneity, tell us someone about the filmmaker’s inner life, whether he or she was aware of it or not.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> A lot of the so called media archaeological art – including yours – has focused on the 19th century and early 20th century cultures and technological apparatuses, from the visual to the sonic (Edison machines for instance). But you are also interested in post-World War II themes. Could you elaborate a bit more about this interest in human motion and management, mental illness, and also labor?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> The project I’m working on right now is an installation called <span class="filmtitle">The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff</span>. It will include video, film, drawings and objects. It began with an invitation from curator Edwin Carels to make a work for the MuHKA Museum in Antwerp.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/infernal_dream_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="310" /></p>
<p>A collection of artifacts from the history of cinema called the Vrieling collection was donated to the museum a few years ago and Edwin has asked three artists to create work that incorporates and creates a dialog with aspects of the collection. I think perhaps he imagined I would work with magic lanterns and early cinema object, but instead I decided to confront what I think many would consider the least glamorous objects, the cameras and projectors that were used to create instructional films in the mid 20th century.</p>
<p>Central to my project are two film from 1950’s, <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span> both of which were part of a collection of 16mm films that were thrown out by Baurch College, a business College here in New York. I took 60 films, all the ones concerning workplace management and psychological disorders, and spent many happy hours screening all of them.</p>
<p>Though I don’t usually begin this way, I started work on the project in a more theoretical fashion by doing a lecture/screening with these films in conjunction with Milgram’s famous <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span> (1962). I talked about cinema and psychosocial control, but - rather, once again - I was thinking back to cinema’s origins in motion studies in the 1880s and 1890s. Marey was paid by the French government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protégé, Albert Londe, analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. By mid-century, this was manifest in the instructional films that I found: <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span>, which was about how to work more efficiently on the assembly line, and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span>, which instructed the viewer how to recognize a particular mental disorder. Here the unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. I was interested in Milgram’s film as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their ideological underpinnings.</p>
<p>I’m working on the installation now. It has taken a more poetic turn, and I hope will go deeper into the subject than I was able to do in a short lecture. I am not working with the <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span> in part because I don’t feel I have anything to add to it. Instead I created my own industrial film that I am putting into dialog with aspects of <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span> in a three-channel work. Now I am working on a series of drawings that are formally inspired by workplace posters. Again, as in all my projects, I am interested in our mental relation with the technologies of the moving image. Here I am drawing on the work of the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the pioneering “industrial engineers,” who believed that the worker could use the tools of cinema to change his work methods and so become more productive. Interestingly, at the same time the writing of Walter Benjamin, in a completely different way, argued that our relation with the technology of the moving image could change us and our perspective on the world. I think of them both as utopians. And I want to comment on these utopias by exploring the relationship between the body, the mind, and objects in movement.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In this work-in-progress you mentioned finding and rescuing dozens of films from the business school collections. In general, the use of archives in artistic – and media archaeological – methods is an interesting theme. Could you elaborate on that a bit?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> Using archives is a natural part of my practice. Occasionally, I use archives as any historian would, to look for specific historical images. For example, when working on <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span>, I wanted to find films shot by doctors of their hysterical patients. However, in many ways I much prefer stumbling on films and being surprised by them. For ten years, from around 1992 to 2002, I went to the flea market every Sunday and bought every home movie that I could find. I had no idea what would be on the rolls of film. Eventually, many of them found their way into my projects, most particularly the Coney Island dream films.</p>
<p>Similarly, I just heard by chance that Baruch College was throwing out their 16mm films and I could get whatever I wanted as long as I showed up before noon with a cardboard box. These found films often push me in new directions, make me think in new ways.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> So its not just about using traditional archives and collections but “found footage” as well, to capture the element of randomness - surprise - as you mention?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> I have strong feelings on the subject of found footage, but I’ll try and be brief.</p>
<p>When I work with film that I did not shoot myself, I think of myself as creating a dialog with the past. I don’t see these films as simply illustrations, the way they are used in TV documentaries. Nor do I want to just cut them up for some kind of cool montage effect. Instead, as I said, I want to create a dialog, to get under their skin, to reveal new aspects of the images that had perhaps remained hidden, to make them speak again but differently, to give them a new voice.</p>
<p>To this end, I prefer to work with films that are themselves abandoned, orphaned, or incomplete - home movies that have lost their families, and industrial films that are considered obsolete and relegated to the scrap heap. I don’t want to work with a film that was made by a director who had his or her own clear vision or voice. That is why I avoid, for example, Hollywood films. They are art too, not just “footage.” That is, in part, why I showed Milgram’s <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span>, but I did not cut it up or incorporate it into my own project. It is his work, not mine. I have done a number of projects - for example, the performance <span class="filmtitle">Claire and Don in Slumberland</span> (2002) - where I begin the presentation with films that I did not make, but I show the works in their entirety. I just want to put them in conjunction with my own thinking, not ingest it or take credit for them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Zoe Beloff’s web page: <a href="http://www.zoebeloff.com" class="outbound">http://www.zoebeloff.com</a></p>
<p>Jussi Parikka’s web page and blog: <a href="http://jussiparikka.net" class="outbound">http://jussiparikka.net</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/found">found</a>, <a href="/tags/industrial">industrial</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/psychoanalysis">psychoanalysis</a>, <a href="/tags/dream">dream</a>, <a href="/tags/archaeology">archaeology</a>, <a href="/tags/milgram">Milgram</a>, <a href="/tags/taylorism">taylorism</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/parapsychology">parapsychology</a>, <a href="/tags/paranormal">paranormal</a>, <a href="/tags/gender">gender</a>, <a href="/tags/medium">medium</a>, <a href="/tags/materiality">materiality</a>, <a href="/tags/cinema">cinema</a>, <a href="/tags/ghost">ghost</a>, <a href="/tags/spirit">spirit</a>, <a href="/tags/haunted">haunted</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1383 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/numerous#commentsShopping for Truthhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/spectacular
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Adrian Gargett</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-03-31</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Dartford, England: Like tourists in a world class museum,<br />
visitors swapped souvenir photos and packed marble halls in Europe’s<br />
largest shopping centre. Bluewater, a complex of 320 shops and<br />
restaurants on the outskirts of London, is the most prominent in a<br />
series of regional mega-malls to open in Britain, where an increasingly<br />
mobile population has warmed to this most American of commercial<br />
concepts.</p>
<p>Built in a former chalk quarry 15 miles east of London,<br />
Bluewater’s 1.68 million square feet of retail space make it the biggest<br />
retail shopping centre in Europe. A white roof bristling with glass<br />
cones and spike shaped air ducts gives it the look of a gleaming tent<br />
city. The complex includes a 12-screen cinema, a conservatory with<br />
tropical trees and parking spaces for 13,000 cars. Quotations by Robert<br />
Graves and other poets adorn its walls, and life-sized statues of<br />
apothecaries and candle-makers line a so-called medieval guildhall. This<br />
atmosphere is designed to recapture the pageantry of city life. Yet the<br />
1970’s soul music echoing down its many corridors and the numerous U.S.<br />
names - like Eddie Bauer and KFC - among its shops and restaurants<br />
reinforce Bluewater’s undeniably American flavour.</p>
<p>However, as the ambler passes through the illuminated spotlit<br />
pools from one more glittering façade, he may, perhaps, feel a frisson.<br />
For here, as if keeping a vaguely remembered appointment, he will<br />
encounter the ghost of an old man - bespectacled, thick-haired, Jewish,<br />
steady of gaze.</p>
<p>His name is Walter Benjamin. Profession, philosopher. But what<br />
has this shadowy, long dead person to do with the $1.6 billion<br />
assemblage behind him, the largest project of its kind that Britain has<br />
ever seen? What possible interest can he have in a development<br />
comparable with the 4.2 million square foot Mall of America complex in<br />
Bloomington, Minn? The wraith is Walter Benjamin and he’d rather be in a<br />
bygone Paris, surrounded by his precious sheaves of folio notecards -<br />
convolutes as he calls them. His gaze moves across the smooth gleaming<br />
edifice of Bluewater’s exterior and rests on the wide gash through the<br />
middle of its glass covering, revealing the grey sky. This he knows<br />
about. It may not be the Passage Choiseul in 1880, but it is the same in<br />
spirit. He nods affirmatively: surely Lend Lease Projects Ltd. has<br />
reinvented the arcades of Paris, where once existence flowed without<br />
accent, like the events in dreams.</p>
<p>Architecture, he recalls scribbling in the 1920s, is the most<br />
important testimony to latent mythology - and the most important<br />
architecture of the 19th century was the arcade. Might arcades have the<br />
same significance in the 21st?</p>
<p>Benjamin shuffles towards the open maw in the exterior façade,<br />
the gateway to this cabinet of curiosities. He encounters. He frowns.<br />
Why is everything so clean? Where is La Chaussee d’Antin and its five<br />
million yards of gabardine and poplin? And where is the sign proclaiming<br />
it to be “the foremost house of fashion in the world, and the most<br />
dependable”? He studies the shop names. What are this Christian Lacroix,<br />
and this Armani? Where are the sculptures at the entrance of the Passage<br />
Vivienne, all the lorgnette dealers, the heaps of tortoise for sale,<br />
grinning rows of false teeth, the life-sized dolls and the fragrant<br />
manageress of La Lampe Merveilleuse?</p>
<p>The ashen shade gathers himself and moves on. After a few<br />
steps, something else catches his eye: a slim booklet, protruding from<br />
an information stand. He picks it up and opens it. “All the elements<br />
needed to create city life with style can be found in Bluewater.”<br />
Benjamin frowns - far too much spectacle and not enough dream! - and<br />
stuffs the booklet into his coat pocket. He begins to proceed slowly up<br />
the length of a strange illuminated runway, skirting round a young woman<br />
in conversation with a man pointing animatedly at a window display. The<br />
philosopher winces and begins to turn away. Then something catches his<br />
ear.</p>
<p>“We live in a sanitised world with enclosed malls,” Eric Kuhne,<br />
the centre’s Texas-born architect is saying. “You’re in a completely<br />
different mindset here. It’s a series of theme based streets through<br />
which millions of people will walk. The concept is to re-imagine with<br />
light and glass the essence and spirit of metropolitan London. I don’t<br />
like American shopping centres; they’re designed like chilling<br />
fortresses. They make us feel like roaches running for cover when the<br />
lights are turned on.”</p>
<p>Benjamin’s eyes narrow and he turns to confront the architect.<br />
“Excuse me for interrupting your discourse, Sir, but you are wrong,” he<br />
says politely but firmly. “There must be ‘enclosure.’ This thing you<br />
have created should be a dream house of the collective. How can you<br />
dream here? Where is the ennui, the huddling, and the stuffiness? And<br />
the erotic - where is that? You can’t reach the future by relying on<br />
mere organised thought and history with its Scotland Yard credentials,<br />
but only by dreaming and waking.” But the pair are quite plainly<br />
completely unaware of Benjamin’s apparition: they see and hear nothing<br />
of him and walk through the faint shimmer of his presence.</p>
<p>The old man pauses to collect himself. “Intolerable,” he<br />
mutters. “Things have never been the same since tarmac replaced the<br />
cobbles in Paris and those cafe layabouts were - unfortunately for<br />
philosophy and literature - able to hear each other speak. And as for Le<br />
Corbusier allowing all that light into buildings - I ask you! How can<br />
one possibly awake from a tawdry miasma when there is no miasma?”</p>
<p class="longQuotation">One would be well advised to approach<br />
Benjamin in an indirect and partial manner, almost through stealth, or<br />
even unawares, en passant, in accordance with the method by which<br />
Benjamin made his best finds as a collector. It will be a question not<br />
so much of assuming the proper distance to Benjamin but of situating<br />
oneself at the appropriate point in space, whether this is to the side<br />
or below. One must run the risk of a certain arbitrariness, which will<br />
pay off if a hitherto-unnoticed detail reveals itself in a fleeting<br />
flash of light. (Pierre Missac)</p>
<p>
In<br /><span class="booktitle">Walter Benjamin’s Passages</span>, Pierre Missac’s method of indirect critique stands in striking<br />
contrast to other critical approaches to Benjamin. It is Missac’s<br />
response to the question of the appropriate distance from Benjamin’s<br />
work at which the critic should be located. This question, as Missac<br />
argues in the chapter entitled “Writing about Benjamin,” illuminates a<br />
key problem with Benjamin criticism: either a critic takes up a<br />
standpoint too close to the work, and the criticism becomes mere<br />
imitation, tautology; or the standpoint is too distant, and Benjamin is<br />
seen through the lens of an ideology, or his work is assimilated to an<br />
existing discipline - Benjamin as a philosopher of science, for example.<br />
Additionally, while other approaches may attempt to deal with the<br />
contradictions and fragmentation in Benjamin’s work through a<br />
“resolution by oxymoron” - “the Marxist rabbi” - or by dividing<br />
Benjamin’s work into two periods - the early and the late or the<br />
theological and the materialist - Missac is intent on avoiding such<br />
treatment. If Missac’s own entrance into Benjamin’s oeuvre seems<br />
deliberately elusive, this is in part because of his commitment to<br />
following out the complexities of Benjamin’s character and work rather<br />
than trying to cover them over with the structures of existing<br />
formulations.
</p>
<p>What this approach produces is a structure that collects<br />
seemingly independent images and details in order to have them conspire,<br />
in the course of the analysis, to yield a new and unexpected larger<br />
pattern or framework of insight. Without collapsing the difference<br />
between empirical biography and textual production or attempting to<br />
reduce one to the other, Missac struggles to articulate the many points<br />
of contact between the two in which Benjamin’s central concerns are<br />
interconnected.</p>
<p>
Missac’s sophisticatedly textured and almost lyrically rhythmic<br />
prose, which at its best reflects Benjamin’s own accomplished writing<br />
from<br /><span class="booktitle">One-Way Street</span><br />
and<br /><span class="booktitle">Berlin Childhood 1900</span><br />
sets into sharp relief Benjamin’s understanding of the<br />
dialectic, of reading and writing, and of film and photography as<br />
complex allegories of time and history. Missac’s text proceeds by<br />
emphasizing central Benjaminian figures such as the miniature, the<br />
philosophically vital difference between stamp and postcard, the<br />
collector and perhaps most originally the gambler. Throughout Missac<br />
meditates obsessively and brilliantly on the figures of “passage” and<br />
“passing” evoked in the study’s title, figures that serve to illuminate<br />
in their plethora of different meanings and contextual uses the better<br />
part of Benjamin’s oeuvre.
</p>
<p>
One central function of “passage” for example, other than its<br />
inference towards Baudelaire’s poem “A une passante” (considered crucial<br />
to Benjamin) and to<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werk</span><br />
itself, is that of being one of the triggers animating<br />
Benjamin’s philosophical preoccupation with death and decay, transience<br />
and mortality. Missac has a deeper project re-invoking the themes of<br />
death and survival and setting the image of the “passage” in relation to<br />
that of the grave or tomb, “tombeau” in French. To this image Missac<br />
situates his book in a dialectical relation in that he foregrounds the<br />
theoretically intriguing and painfully empirical fact that Benjamin has<br />
no marked grave and that no one wrote him a formal tombeau - a poem, on<br />
the occasion of the dedication of his monument, honouring the dead<br />
writer’s achievement, such as Mallarme wrote for Baudelaire or Poe.<br />
Missac’s text thus both perpetrates Benjamin’s eternal coming-to-pass<br />
and interrupts it by becoming the very tombeau desired.
</p>
<p>In many respects Missac intends to construct a work that is<br />
clearly designed to be a tombeau for Benjamin, in that it integrates<br />
Benjamin’s character, life and work into the complex unity that<br />
constitutes that whole - an homage demonstrating how his work<br />
anticipated the future and how it encompasses vital elements that extend<br />
resonantly into the contemporary condition. However, this is very much a<br />
“post-tradition” tombeau and this is why the motif of the “passage” is<br />
the most appropriate central image deployed. Among other things,<br />
“passage” in Benjamin, and for Missac writing about Benjamin, signifies<br />
transition and change. It allows an exploration of the multifaceted<br />
elaboration of the central but enigmatic question of the nature of the<br />
dialectic in Benjamin and the variety of aspects of “writing” in<br />
Benjamin’s work, from discussions of genre, including the thesis and the<br />
aphorism, with their associated issues of brevity and complexification,<br />
to the interplay of linear and dialectical composition and the notion of<br />
a secret or interior architecture in the work. In this sense too,<br />
Missac’s book consists of a series of repeated attempts to approach<br />
Benjamin’s death - at the impassable border between France and Spain -<br />
by routes and through aspects of his life and work. The book is a series<br />
of passages to Benjamin’s death as well as a tombeau for one who had<br />
none.</p>
<p>The notion of the ‘passage” also explicates Missac’s criticism<br />
of indirection. It refers to a mode of seeking and comprehending that is<br />
non-frontal but sudden and indirect, like the movements of the knight in<br />
chess, to which Missac repeatedly compares to Benjamin’s mode of<br />
operating. This in turn leads back along another avenue to the central<br />
theme of Benjamin’s relation to time and space, and thus to the aura,<br />
and the phenomena of distance as well. Far away so close, too early and<br />
yet too late define not only to discern the aura of the artwork but also<br />
Benjamin’s relation to the act of writing, and to time past, present,<br />
and future. In the “too early” and the “too late” the present moment is<br />
obliterated. The destruction of the present is opposed by a<br />
countervailing force in Benjamin’s relationship to time, notably the<br />
instant, the messianic rupture. This image of the passage leads us by<br />
another indirect route to the dialectic in suspension and to Benjamin<br />
the “materialist” historian.</p>
<p>Benjamin’s personal battle with time ended with his suicide and<br />
while Missac’s routes lead inevitably to that moment, the intention is<br />
additionally to open the possibility of Benjamin’s survival, by<br />
demonstrating how Benjamin’s work anticipated the future, and<br />
diversifying the analysis into the present. Benjamin’s program is<br />
engaged at several points: through a reflection on the contemporary<br />
progression of reading and literature, for instance, foreshadowed by<br />
Benjamin’s interpretation of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de des” as a<br />
proto-advertising poster. These inquiries are taken further in a chapter<br />
where Missac examines Benjamin’s discussions of photography and film in<br />
relation to his concepts of time and history. This proves,<br />
characteristically, to be far more than a recapitulation of Benjamin’s<br />
essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Missac<br />
presents film as the epitome of the dialectical process, the<br />
constructive negation of each momentary image by the one that succeeds<br />
it. Here Benjamin’s effort to stop time in its course is pushed to an<br />
extreme. This discussion subsequently transmutes to form the context for<br />
Missac’s extended exploration of Benjamin’s battle with time, which<br />
became his adversary; in this connection Missac again comes to the<br />
question of the dialectic in the dialectical image and the dialectic<br />
cessation.</p>
<p>If in this way Missac’s critical writing is a refined form of<br />
mourning, the author registers the extent to which such writing as<br />
mourning must also exceed and fall short of itself: “There is a mode or<br />
function of writing,” Missac reflects, “in which it comes to fulfilment,<br />
and puts itself in question.” It is as if Missac’s sensitivity to<br />
Benjamin’s language animates his own, for instance when he notes that if<br />
Benjamin’s writing has a richness, not comparable to the works of other<br />
writers, this is because we find in them the echo or perhaps the<br />
ineffaceable trace of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of<br />
language. His acute awareness of these problems haunted him, and he<br />
manifested that awareness in the most concrete way possible. Missac’s<br />
investigation adeptly animates the philosophical relationship between<br />
passage and myth. When Missac cunningly relates this unique Benjaminian<br />
hauntedness, as he does, to the catastrophic loss of the fountain pen,<br />
the systematically windblown hairstyle, in the casual outfit, or the<br />
philosophical implications of playing games of chess, he reaches through<br />
analysis of the smallest details - as though they were the miniature<br />
objects of which Benjamin was so infinitely fond - toward conclusions<br />
more startling and far-reaching than those achieved by the most<br />
panoramic reviewers.</p>
<p>The present is partial and intense because it is the site of<br />
repetition, the place continually structured by repetition, an eternal<br />
recurrence, and therefore the potential site of its disruptive<br />
continuity.</p>
<p>Benjamin’s writing strives to attain a haunted and<br />
incommensurable quality by constructing a strategic constellation which<br />
does justice to its ghostly resistance to understanding and its deeply<br />
and powerfully critical transformative potential.</p>
<p>
To what extent does Benjamin’s language stage this “haunted”<br />
quality which it so clearly evokes? Is this hauntedness found in the<br />
figure for the self-referential condition of language in which according<br />
to Benjamin “language communicates itself” rather than a separable<br />
content? “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present<br />
or that what is present casts its lights on what is past,” Benjamin<br />
explains in the<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werken</span>, “rather, an image is that in which the Former and the Now<br />
merge, like a flash of lightening, into a constellation.” What this<br />
implies is that the Benjaminian flash that gives rise to the potentially<br />
legible image of history both illuminates and blinds.
</p>
<p>What is idiomatic and singuar in a text, what Benjamin calls<br />
“the extraordinary, the amazing” - how it confirms its context which<br />
simultaneously betrays it in order to remain faithful to it. For<br />
Benjamin there can ultimately be no cultural analysis that does not<br />
somehow strive to come to terms with, and therefore become affected by,<br />
the movement and difficulty of the language that it would take as its<br />
object of study, and it is in this sense that Benjamin insists on a<br />
textual model of cultural and historical interpretation. As he writes in<br />
an early fragment, “theory must not refer to reality but rather must be<br />
a matter of language.”</p>
<p class="longQuotation">One may also approach Benjamin’s writings<br />
by induction, so to speak, moving from the less to the more, from one<br />
part that can be grasped to a whole that is constantly threatening to<br />
elude one’s grasp but that can be reconstituted bit by bit. This would<br />
mean adopting the method that starts with the leaf in order to then<br />
rediscover “all the riches of the empirical world of plants.” (Pierre<br />
Missac)</p>
<p>
One of the principal concepts Benjamin invents to describe what<br />
happens to the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility<br />
(principally the age of the camera) is the loss of “aura.” Until roughly<br />
the middle of the 19th century, he says, an intersubjective relationship<br />
of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: “To perceive the<br />
aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with a capacity to look at us<br />
in turn.” There is thus something magical about aura, derived from<br />
ancient links, now wandering between art and religious ritual. Benjamin<br />
first speaks of aura in his<br /><span class="booktitle">Little History of Photography</span><br />
(1931), where he attempts to explain why it is that, in his<br />
eyes, the very earliest portrait photographs - the incunabula of<br />
photography - have auras, whereas photographs of a generation later have<br />
lost them. In “The Work of Art,” the notion of aura is extended rather<br />
recklessly from old photographs to works of art in general. The end of<br />
the aura, says Benjamin, will be more than compensated for by the<br />
emancipatory capacities of the new technologies of reproduction. Cinema<br />
will replace auratic art. In this formulation Benjamin’s concept, in its<br />
incubational stage, proves highly elusive, and yet it is clear that the<br />
general analysis is working in a direction that is quite compelling.<br />
Throughout the 1930’s Benjamin struggled to develop an acceptable<br />
materialist definition of aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he<br />
says, because the camera, being an instrument, cannot see. In a<br />
subsequent revision he suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the<br />
moment in history when urban crowds grew so dense that people -<br />
passers-by - no longer returned one another’s gaze. In the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br />
he makes the loss of aura part of a wider development: the<br />
spread of a disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the<br />
uniqueness of the traditional artwork, has become a commodity like any<br />
other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the fabrication of<br />
unique handiworks intended to be reproduced on a mass scale, points the<br />
way here.
</p>
<p>In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work that would deal<br />
with urban experience; inspired by the arcades of Paris, it would be a<br />
version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical fairy tale told<br />
surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the<br />
prince’s kiss, it would awaken the European masses to the truth of their<br />
lives under capitalism. It would be 50 pages long; in preparation for<br />
its writing Benjamin began to copy out quotations under such headings as<br />
Boredom, Fashion, Dust. However, as a stitched together text, it became<br />
overgrown each time with new quotations and notes. Subsequently he<br />
became disillusioned with this version after criticism from Adorno and<br />
Horkheimer that he lacked sufficient grounding in Marxist theory.</p>
<p>
By 1934 Benjamin had a new more philosophically ambitious plan:<br />
using the same method of montage, he would trace the cultural<br />
superstructure of 19th century France back to commodities and their<br />
power to become fetishes. As his notes grew in scale, he slotted them<br />
into an elaborate filing system based on 36 convolutes (from<br /><italic>German Konvolut</italic>: sheaf, dossier) with keywords and cross-references. Under the<br />
title “Paris, Capital of the 19th century” he wrote a resume of the<br />
material which he submitted to Adorno.
</p>
<p>Once again, Adorno’s comments proved adverse. In an attempt to<br />
utilize the material, Benjamin abandoned the outline of the project, but<br />
used its core to construct a book on Baudelaire. Adorno saw sections of<br />
the developments commenting that the facts should not be allowed to<br />
stand alone; a greater emphasis on theory was necessary. Benjamin made<br />
the required amendments, which received a more complementary<br />
reaction.</p>
<p>
Baudelaire is central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin’s<br />
opinion,<br /><span class="booktitle">Les Fleurs du Mal</span><br />
first revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry.<br />
Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary<br />
mode out of fashion since the Baroque. In “Le Cygne”, for instance, he<br />
allegorises the poet as a swan, scrabbling comically in the paved<br />
marketplace, unable to spread its wings and soar. Why did Baudelaire opt<br />
for this allegorical mode? Benjamin uses Marx’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Kapital</span><br />
to answer this question. The elevation of market value into the<br />
sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a commodity to nothing but a<br />
sign - the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the market,<br />
things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in<br />
baroque emblematics, a death’s head relates to man’s subjection to time.<br />
Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the historical stage in the<br />
form of commodities which, as Marx had warned, “(abound) in metaphysical<br />
subtleties and theological niceties.” Allegory, Benjamin argues, is<br />
exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the<br />
never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for<br />
the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span>. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the<br />
Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly<br />
from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well,<br />
grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of<br />
plans and synopses.
</p>
<p>
The history of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span>, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings<br />
in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting<br />
theoretical ground, of criticisms and generally of Benjamin not knowing<br />
his mind, means that the work we are left with is radically incomplete;<br />
incompletely conceived and hardly “written” in any conventional sense.<br />
The structure is apparent but the linking thoughts remain disconnected,<br />
existing only in the form of Benjamin’s interpolations, resulting in an<br />
ambiguous fluidity.
</p>
<p>The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are “inner<br />
boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through<br />
blocks of buildings - lining both sides - are the most elegant shops, so<br />
that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.” Their airy glass<br />
and steel architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the west.<br />
The heyday of arcades extended to the end of the century, when they were<br />
eclipsed by department stores.</p>
<p>
The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history<br />
(though part of its ambition was to act as a corrective to the entire<br />
discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests something far<br />
more like the autobiographical work,<br /><span class="booktitle">A Berlin Childhood</span>. “One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down<br />
into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at<br />
certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - land full of<br />
inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting<br />
nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are<br />
groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day,<br />
the labyrinth of urban dwelling resembles consciousness; the arcades<br />
issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the<br />
tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a<br />
threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past - unless, that is, we<br />
have emboldened him to turn into a narrow lane.”
</p>
<p>
Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon’s<br /><span class="booktitle">A Paris Peasant</span>, with its affectionate tribute to the Passages de L’Opera, and<br />
Franz Hessel’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Strolling in Berlin</span>, which focuses on the Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up<br />
the atmosphere of a bygone era. In his book Benjamin would try to<br />
capture the “phantasmagoric” experience of the Parisian wandering among<br />
displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when<br />
“arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil<br />
remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of<br />
capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.” The great innovation of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br />
would be its form. It would work on the principle of montage,<br />
juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation<br />
that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for<br />
instance, if item 2,1 of convolute L, referring to the opening of an art<br />
museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in conjunction with<br />
item 2,4 of convolute A which traces the development of arcades into<br />
department stores, then ideally the analogy “museum is to department<br />
store as artwork is to commodity” will flash into the readers mind.
</p>
<p>According to Max Weber, what marks the modern world is loss of<br />
belief, disenchantment. Benjamin has a different angle: that capitalism<br />
has put people to sleep, that they will wake up from their collective<br />
“enchantment” only when they are made to understand what has happened to<br />
them. The inscription to convolute N comes from Marx: “The reform of<br />
consciousness consists solely in the awakening of the world from its<br />
dream about itself.” The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in<br />
commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria,<br />
constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered<br />
to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest<br />
desires. The phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in<br />
alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in Benjamin is thus a little like<br />
ideology in Marx - a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of<br />
capital - but is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective,<br />
social level. “I needn’t say anything. Merely show,” says Benjamin; and<br />
elsewhere: “Ideas are objects as constellations are to stars.” If the<br />
mosaic of quotations is built up correctly a pattern should emerge that<br />
is more than the sum of its parts but which cannot exist independently<br />
of them: this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialistic<br />
writing that Benjamin believed himself to be practising.</p>
<p>
In order to illuminate the structural framework of the<br /><span class="booktitle">Arcades Project</span><br />
- to facilitate an enhanced interpretation - Benjamin invented<br />
the notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to the<br />
baroque emblematic: ideas represented by pictures and Baudelairian<br />
allegory. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the role of abstract<br />
thought. The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades - gamblers,<br />
whores, mirrors, dust, wax figures - are to Benjamin emblems, and their<br />
interactions generate meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory.<br />
Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from the past and placed<br />
in the charged field of the historical present are capable of behaving<br />
much as the elements of a surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously<br />
to give off political energy. In so doing the fragments constitute the<br />
dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a moment open for<br />
inspection, dialectics at a standstill: “Only dialectical images are<br />
genuine images.”
</p>
<p>In one respect Benjamin’s texts are deeply committed to<br />
political intervention, historical insight, and cultural<br />
demystification. Indeed epistemic concepts such as “Berlin,” “Weimer<br />
Germany,” and “Modernity” are significant to his writing, and it is<br />
essential to position Benjamin’s multiple perspective in these<br />
ideological systems. Alternatively Benjamin’s elaborately hermetic texts<br />
unfold in a singularity that appears tenaciously to resist assimilation<br />
into a structured systematic construct. Essentially, the particular<br />
theoretical beauty, and uniqueness of Benjamin’s texts resides in the<br />
presence of narrative gestures that provide openings/concepts with which<br />
to access and formulate an analysis. Any understanding of Benjamin’s<br />
writing and the experience of the singularity they afford is thus<br />
predicated upon the acknowledgement that an interpretation is a process<br />
developing through and adoption and utilization of the text itself.</p>
<p>Benjamin attempted to construct a theoretical and philosophical<br />
program that would allow him, “to illuminate the work fully from within<br />
itself.” The theoretical tension between text and culture and, by<br />
extension, any historically mimetic model, is further complicated by<br />
Benjamin’s distinctive assumptions about historical traces and their<br />
highly contingent relationship to a particular context. The historical<br />
traces that mark a text, therefore do not necessarily mean that it<br />
stands in a necessary relationship to the time in which it was produced.<br />
“The time of history is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled in<br />
every moment. This means that no single empirical event is thinkable<br />
that would stand in a necessary relationship to the particular<br />
historical situation in which it occurs.”</p>
<p>Any engagement with Benjamin’s writing must therefore in some<br />
way account for the tension between text and its position in history and<br />
culture. It is this issue that informs the central narrative line in<br />
Pierre Missac’s analysis.</p>
<p>
“It (language) is primary. Not only to meaning. Also to one’s<br />
self. In the configuration of the world, the dream loosens individuality<br />
like a hollow tooth.” For Benjamin, language both exceeds stable meaning<br />
and self. This excess, though, need not be principally destructive or<br />
nihilistic but rather, is dialectically charged. For Benjamin, it is<br />
always a matter of registering the extent to which the figural or<br />
representational dimensions of a text and a culture are structurally<br />
related in that they tend to exceed or fall short of that which they<br />
seem to concentrate upon, on the surface level. Just as Benjamin’s<br />
“storyteller” in the essay of 1936 is said to be the one who would have<br />
the wick of life be slowly but completely consumed by the soft flame of<br />
its very narration, the process of unfolding Benjamin’s writing involves<br />
registering, as Benjamin writes in<br /><span class="booktitle">Elective Affinities</span><br />
the “enigma of the flame itself,” which is to say with regard to<br />
the relation between text and culture, “the truth whose living flame<br />
goes on burning over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes<br />
of what has been lived.”
</p>
<p>
From a distance, Benjamin’s magnificent opus is reminiscent of<br />
another great ruin of 20th century literature, Ezra Pound’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Cantos</span>. Both works are built out of fragments, and adhere to the<br />
high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic<br />
ambitions and economists as presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell<br />
and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian<br />
bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they<br />
overestimate. Neither can seem to accomplish any definite conclusion<br />
points. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism:<br />
Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.
</p>
<p>“Given the abundance of texts that Benjamin copied out or wrote<br />
to be included in his magnum opus, one thinks rather of the debris<br />
heaped on the site of ancient buildings, its fate not yet decided.”<br />
(Pierre Missac)</p>
<p>Missac’s exploration of Benjamin’s writing foregrounds its<br />
fragility: for a number of important works, it is their fragility that<br />
makes a virtue of a vice and guarantees their quality as ruins,<br />
transfiguring them as debris.</p>
<p>Benjamin’s trademark approach - coming at a subject not<br />
straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly<br />
formulated summation to the next - is as instantly recognisable as it is<br />
inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn<br />
and a prose style which, once freed of the bonds of academic theory,<br />
became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of<br />
getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found expressed in<br />
Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their<br />
own theory.</p>
<p>
<span class="booktitle">The Arcades Project</span>, whatever our verdict on it - ruin, failure, impossible project<br />
- suggests a new way of writing about a culture using its rubbish as<br />
materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than<br />
above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the sufferings of<br />
the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is<br />
prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of<br />
itself in our lifetime.
</p>
<p>
Benjamin’s texts are nothing if not obsessive destructions of<br />
the philosophical tradition. As he states in the<br /><span class="booktitle">Passagen-Werk</span>, “construction presupposes destruction.” For Benjamin<br />
destruction always implied the destruction of some false or deceptive<br />
form of experience as the productive condition for the initiation of a<br />
new relation to the object, as when allegory seems to destabilize the<br />
symbols mis-leading veil of closure and totality, or when the rupturing<br />
of the aura in photography enables the experience of the hitherto<br />
unknown sphere of what Benjamin terms the “optical unconscious.”<br />
Proceeding from an investigation into Benjaminian moments of destruction<br />
as moments of thinking temporality (and ultimately the movement of<br />
destruction of history itself).
</p>
<p>Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th century<br />
France? There is no doubt that to rationalise and design Benjamin in<br />
preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital’s cultural machine<br />
is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have<br />
appreciated. A recovery of the sense of Benjamin’s writing is the surest<br />
path to its radical impoverishment. The object of philosophy, insofar as<br />
the reflective meditation upon thought could be taken to characterize<br />
it, is arbitrarily prescribed as undisturbed reasoning. It is thus that<br />
successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate and productive reason<br />
monopolizes the philosophical conception of thought, in the same way<br />
that the generalized somnambulism of regulated labour precludes all<br />
intense gestures from social existence. Who cares what “anyone” thinks,<br />
knows, or theorizes about Benjamin? The only thing to try and touch is<br />
the intense shock wave that still reaches us along with the textual<br />
embers, for as long, that is, as anything can still “reach us.” Where<br />
Descartes needed God to mediate his relations with his contemporaries,<br />
secular humanity is content with the TV-screen, and with all the other<br />
commodified channels of simulated communication with which civilization<br />
is so thoughtfully endowed. Such things are for our own protection of<br />
course; to filter out the terrifying threat of a realisation that would<br />
awaken us from our dream.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/bluewater">bluewater</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-graves">robert graves</a>, <a href="/tags/mall-america">mall of america</a>, <a href="/tags/passage-choiseul">passage choiseul</a>, <a href="/tags/lend-lease-projects-ltd">lend lease projects ltd.</a>, <a href="/tags/architecture">architecture</a>, <a href="/tags/arcades">arcades</a>, <a href="/tags/eric-kuhne">eric kuhne</a>, <a href="/tags/spectacle">spectacle</a>, <a href="/tags/dream">dream</a>, <a href="/tags/illuminations">illuminations</a>, <a href="/tags/le-corbusier">le corbusier</a>, <a href="/tags/ezra-pound">ezra pound</a>, <a href="/tags/cantos">cantos</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator669 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com